ABSTRACT
The past generation of historically infl ected critical work on The Merchant of Venice has generally accepted the premise that Shakespeare wrote an antisemitic play structured, as Stephen Greenblatt puts it, on “the central dramatic confl ict of Jew and Gentile, or more precisely, of Jewish fi scalism and Gentile mercantilism.”1 Those who fi nd Merchant frankly insulting to modern sensibilities have good reason to be suspicious of the ways in which the virulent expressions of antisemitism in the play have been treated both in critical commentary and in the work’s performance history. Faced with a performance tradition that generally attempts to mitigate that virulence by encouraging the lead actor to use all of the resources of naturalist theatre in order to sentimentalize Shylock, and with a critical reception history that regularly describes the Venetian characters as exemplars of a civil generosity that refl ects theological values, there is ample reason for Alan Sinfi eld’s dismissal of the argument that Merchant might have been intended as a satire on the sanctimonious avarice of the Christians and of their hypocrisy in projecting their own worst traits onto the scapegoated fi gure of the Jew. Sinfi eld argues that there is less diff erence than there seems between those who idealize the play’s Christian characters and those who see the play as a critique of the fl aws of those characters, and he suggests that “even a ‘sympathetic’ presentation, with Shylock as victim” ends up saying that “the Christians are as bad as the Jews-who function, therefore, as an index of badness.” Both the idealized reading and the darker reading, Sinfi eld contends, accept “an underlying us-and-them pattern” in the play.2
